![]() He is the son of Anglo-German Orientalists, learned, well-mannered, humorous, the epitome of civilization, but a physical wreck after three years in a Japanese camp, and mentally broken after losing his Japanese wife, who was driven to suicide after being rejected by her own people. At the drunken party scene in the hospital, Leith meets Professor Gardiner. In this postwar purgatory, old civilities are dying or already dead. We Australians are easygoing.” And of course Brigadier Driscoll bawls out the Japanese. They are given to such statements as: “We don’t go in for conversation here: we like plain talk. The Driscolls conform a little too much to a philistine Australian type to be of much interest as characters. The lords of this particular outfit are a ghastly Australian brigadier named Barry Driscoll and his equally unattractive wife, Melba. The only party Leith encounters on his arrival in Japan is a dismal affair in an army hospital, where drunken Australian doctors, nurses, and patients (“surprised by peace”) clap and dance around a gramophone to songs like this:Īnd while they dance, they are served tinned food by the silent Japanese who are at the beck and call of the loud martinets whom military victory has transformed from provincial nobodies to lords over a conquered people. His father, Oliver, is a cold and distant man who writes successful novels about passionate love. Leith is a literary man with one theme, “loss and disruption.” Literature runs in his family. Before arriving in Japan, Leith has spent two years traveling in China to survey the wreckage-anything from the ruined cities to the remains of British pilots who crashed on their way from Burma. He is a professional chronicler of destruction. ![]() The charred remains of a great city give off the “spectral odour of cinders.” Aldred Leith, a British officer in his early thirties, is in Japan to write about the wartime devastation, specifically in Hiroshima. The story begins with a lurching train ride through the rain-soaked ruins of Tokyo. This is the postwar world described so beautifully in Shirley Hazzard’s latest novel, The Great Fire. And for some the thrills of war could never be matched by the boredom of peace. However horrible the war had been, the end for many came as a deadly anticlimax, when old lives were too broken to be resumed. They were too hungry, embittered, disillusioned, anxious, or just too damned tired to be in a party mood. However, just as many young people in the 1960s felt left out of the drug-fueled orgy that was supposed to be taking place around them yet had somehow failed to reach their neighborhood, most people were left untouched by postwar hedonism. This too contained much life, even some hope, but of a bittersweet kind. It was the same in many countries liberated from the Third Reich the arrival of Allied troops produced a dizzying baby boom. What Japanese remember of the second postwar time, through the movies as well as through real memories, is not just the desperate poverty of a devastated country, the need to sell the family heirlooms in exchange for a little food, but Glenn Miller, silk stockings, striptease, “decadent” writers, and brightly dressed whores. There was hedonism after World War II as well, in Japan as much as in Europe and the United States. It was as if the world, from Berlin to New York, had to engage in frenzied living to forget the stench of death. The excesses of the 1920s followed the slaughter of a generation in World War I. Decadence usually means excess: the giddy hedonism of Weimar Berlin, a fizzy cocktail of flappers, jazz, and sexual perversion-not only alive, but dancing on the edge of hysteria. Decadence literally refers to something that is falling away.
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